Blog - Michael Herring Design » Web

Hurting Web Accessibility: SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool

Michael — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:13:14 +0000

(Sigh)
I guess I’ll add a web development post to this mostly art-related blog.

Today, I ran across an excellent list of 100 killer web accessibility resources. Most of these resources are quite good for reference and learning material.

However, I take offense to the SEO Alt Tag (sic) Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool link. I will not link to it here, but I will provide the URL for those interested:

http://www.indiana-loans.co.uk/wordpress-plugin-seo-alt-tag-optimzer-font-resizer-tool/

Objections

As an accessibility-aware web professional, I have some strong objections to this plugin:

Alt attributes should absolutely not be used solely for SEO purposes. They should be used to convey the purpose of the image or the function of the link surrounding the image. Please see Appropriate Use of Alternative Text for an excellent explanation of the proper usage of alt text.

Alt attribute usage seems quite simple at first (with the rule that every image must have an alt attribute), but text within the alt attribute and indeed, even the need for text within the attribute requires careful thought.

The SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool abuses alt text for the wrong intentions of possibly placing your site higher in search engine rankings by using inappropriate alt text.

Accessibility Attribute Abuse

Even though screen-reader users don‘t need to use a font-size switcher, they do rely heavily on proper alt text for images. Consider this HTML snippet from the plugin creator’s page which uses the plugin:

[snip] Decrease font size for Post - SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool (WordPress plugin) - Uncategorised Topics - Indiana Loans Ltd" onclick="fnChangeFontSize(‘body‘,-1);" border="0" width="18" height="14" title="To reduce font size, please enable JavaScript and Trust this Site" longdesc="http://www.indiana-loans.co.uk/wordpress-plugin-font-resizer-tool-help-page/" /> [snip]

There are 2 major problems with the above code (and some minor problems I won’t get into):

The alt value of “Decrease font size for Post – SEO Alt Tag Optimizer & Font Resizer Tool (WordPress plugin) – Uncategorised Topics – Indiana Loans Ltd” does not provide any information that is useful for a screen-reader user, which is what the alt attribute was created for. Instead, there is excessive marketing language and the useless information about reducing font size (remember, screen-reader software has no concept of font sizing).
There is a misuse of the longdesc attribute to point to a help page for the font-resizer plugin. The longdesc is meant to provide an equivalent to a very complicated image like a chart or graph. It is not meant to provide help text for an application or plugin.

URL Problems

Also, being nit-picky as usual, there are some problems within the URL of the plugin’s creator:

http://www.indiana-loans.co.uk/wordpress-plugin-seo-alt-tag-optimzer-font-resizer-tool/

Who would trust a plugin from a url that contains ‘indiana-loans’? That’s pure keyword-stuffing, and not anything that would give any indication of a developer’s website. It appears to be a loan website.
Usage of the term ‘alt-tag’ is seriously frowned upon by accessibility experts. It’s an alt attribute!
‘optimzer’ – misspellings (when not intentional) probably do not help with search engine optimization.

Okay, I’m done. I ran across this link this afternoon and it just kinda pissed me off. I hate seeing Web accessibility techniques being abused for SEO purposes.

The Bad Balance saga pt. 5 or so

Michael — Sat, 27 Sep 2003 17:19:08 +0000

Whut—I’ve just transferred the Bad Balance site to php, and it really wasn’t that difficult. As I was only using asp to do sequential image pages and includes. After 5 days, I’ve finally had enough time to fix it. And this is great and also wonderful.

Transition Disaster

Michael — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:54:59 +0000

I’m in the middle of a bungled-up transition from a Windows host to an Apache host. I thought using Chilisoft ASP would be fine, but nobody can tell me how to correctly path my virtual includes, and every asp page has an ugly URL that comes with it.

I’d call this a learning experience.

Now I have to recode 3 sites into php. The asp and php is not doing anything too fancy. I’m just using them for includes and if-else statements, etc. But still. And dang.

Domain Names

Michael — Sat, 12 Oct 2002 18:24:01 +0000

I just remembered that if I put links on here and then click them, there’s the possibility of the webmaster of Hy-Vee, for example, to get at this site through the referer logs. Yeah, right.

I just learned that according to dictionary.com, ‘referer’ is “a misspelling of ‘referrer’ which somehow made it into the HTTP standard.”

Mmm-hmm, I forgot who’s been doing this already, but there are many good domain names that are not yet reserved:

misterawesome.com
ultra-awesome.com
super-mega-ultra.com
crazyill.com
and so forth

Maybe because those domain names are so nice people think they’re weak. Or maybe everyone’s sick of domain names by now. At least Stupid Fresh and Crazy Fresh are upon in it.

Nobody Sees This

Michael — Sun, 09 Sep 2001 00:33:11 +0000

I’ve been recently realizing that nobody sees this blog, so it is doing the job I hoped it would do. And that is to serve as a journal that has the possibility of being seen. For you see, the last time I wrote in any kind of a journal, it was hell to read through because I was writing as if it would never be seen by anyone. And for me, that creates shitty writing.

And my spider seems to have died after sucking all the blood out of some huge insect. Maybe the blood was poisoned or the spider ate too damn much.

My internship just turned into a full time Webmaster position. So now I am an entry-level webmaster. Shit. Who ever heard of an entry level webmaster? This job is doomed.